Earlier this year I announced that Gamers With Jobs was holding its first call for writers in quite a few years. Honestly, what I had thought would happen next is that we’d get a dozen drafts, maybe as many as twenty, and I would review them over the next week or two and come to some decisions.

That is not what happened.

What happened was that some 80 or so drafts landed in my inbox, which in the long run — hooray, we’ve got a lot of talented people interested in writing for us. In the short run, however, it meant this process was going to take some time to finish. But what I did next was the part that really put the brakes on. I decided I was going to send everyone feedback. A decision, by the way, that I’m still glad that I made, though we are now more than a month out since the call closed, and if I’m completely honest I still have twenty something drafts to go.

At this point, some of you have heard from me, and some of you have not. By the end, all of you will have heard from me one way or the other, and hopefully what I will have to say will be, if not an invitation to our writing community, at least valuable thoughts on what I saw and thought while reading your draft. It’s been good, because this exercise has gotten me thinking about writing in a way I haven’t done for a very long time.

The downside to that is that ultimately what I’m saying today is: Thank you for your patience, but I’m going to need a little more of it. However, as long as we have this time together, let me tell you a few of my general thoughts as I’ve been going through the process.